Tier 2, Babylon Prefecture

Some sounds are heard better in the quiet, some faces better seen in the dark.

Bells jingle and the door hinges complain. Greasy magazines closest to the shop entrance tremble on rotating stands, the blaring horns and vehicular devilry outside abruptly muffled to a harmless hum as the front door slams to.

The newcomer has on muddy boots, which they don’t bother to brush off on the entrance mat (despite the sign in all caps). They walk stiffly forward into the hazy shop interior, wearing sunglasses.

Their short-cropped, artificial-blue hair is dripping under a soaking wet baseball cap, rivulets of dye running down skin made sallower still under the yellow lights. Two flashing eyes flick briefly around the tiny shop, taking it all in.

"Welcome to Turner," announces a man they call “the grim reaper” behind the cash register.

He can't be bothered to look up from his crossword puzzle, his face half bathed in shadow under the broad brim of a gray fedora. Along the off-white back wall behind the cash register are three different television sets installed into the walls plugged into outlets installed on the beige linoleum floors, multicolored cables spilling out from underneath the cash register trail across a glass display case, are wound into a tight bundle along the floor just to disappear off into a corner under several empty cardboard boxes sporting various product logos. Most of these cheap, plastic, mostly useless gadgets are already on display or being kept around simply because they’ve been forgotten. Turner was part convenience, part antique store, and it was up to date on its inspection according to the neon sign hanging on the wall. It was also the last of its kind in this side of Babylon city.

His soot-tipped fingers tap on the glass counter mindlessly, a half-smoked cigarette hanging off his lower lip.

Several moments pass.

The silence grows into uncomfortable territory and the grim reaper becomes aggravatingly aware he's being watched. Intently.

The hunchback man puts out his cigarette directly on the counter, lights another. Then he reverently removes his fedora with his thumb and middle finger. Touches it to his chest before setting it down. All the while keeping a good grip on the leather holster at his hip with his other hand.

He brushes his greasy mane back. Nods to himself. Grunts.

And finally looks up.

The red ember of his cig glows, mirrored in his faded blue eyes set in a wrinkly face. The sight before him drains the blood from his already grey skin.

He draws on the cig again with a suddenly jittery hand. A moment of indecision. He exhales, his face briefly shrouded by a plume of smoke. As the smoke clears he draws the pistol (not without flourish), and aims good at the newcomer. Red and gold sparks streak across the dim shop interior, a stack of magazines clattering to the floor where the newcomer’s head should have been.

The reaper blinks.

"Damn hologs, damn…" Reaper says before his mouth is flooded with blood.

The pistol was meant for jumpers, and boy, did the newcomer jump. Jumped and sent a dart flying right into the old man's jugular.

Red transgresses against sudden palor - two rivers streaming down from both nostrils. The linoleum never saw such pretty rain...

It's early evening, and the city skyline is invisible behind the billowing clouds of orange smog. Searching skylight beams sweep across the bones of Babylon, hungry for more meat to pick off her metallic carcass.

“The dust,” a colloquialism for industrial fallout, is everywhere and demands constant washing, a task taken care of by the City Janitorial Cooperative - the drone boys - operating almost exclusively in tier 1 districts. In tier 2 districts, washing only happens when tier 1 official heads pay a visit. As for tier 3, “the dust” maintains unchallenged sovereignty. Only harvesters brave tier 3 terrain.

There are two kinds of harvesters - the ones with a death wish, and the ones with less of a death wish. The ones with less of a death wish invest in toxin-filtration implants (if they can get them) which are then appended to all relevant anatomical orifices. And when they aren’t harvesting, they mostly live in decontamination stations while their blood cells forget to be cells. But if they could afford the proper protective gear they wouldn’t be harvesting to begin with.

Many tier 3 districts were closed off indefinitely after public officials learned the dust that falls in Babylon corrupts everything (who would have thunk it!). It’s a special strain of fallout, as far as fallout goes. The least impressive of its capabilities - puzzling signals and scattering lasers, thus rendering detection and tracking tech of any kind, entirely useless. So, naturally, hologs are not welcome there. And neither is anything particularly sentient.

In tier 1 and 2 districts, hologs make up the majority of citizens. It's the recommended solution to air troubles - man as many hologs as you can afford. Better still, man them remotely from the comfort of a Locker - a bed and breakfast type establishment where breakfast is fed intravenously, the beds are hospital grade, and everyone is perpetually in a coma. Once you’re hooked up into the stream, you exist as your holog and can wander the city freely, your privacy guaranteed by the White Light District, Office no. 662 (they have your best interest in mind).

The more affordable Lockers, which the masses flock to, use synthetic serums to induce a coma, a cocktail of morphine and sedatives pumped into the herd until plugging into the stream is no longer a choice.

On the current city layout, Turner has its main entrance on the street level, squished between the butcher's and the morgue. The shopfront mannequins are donned with studded corsets, black skirts decked with metallic belts and garters made from steel chains and gears instead of delicate fabrics.

These are just mannequins and nothing more. The flashier shops have automatons, like the ones gyrating to bumpy music and neon strobes a block away. Sometimes it’s even possible to rent one of these mannequins for a night.

Yet Turner is still in business. Somehow.

And the mannequins aren't for rent.

Its mildly sharp apparel or the strength of its library isn't what it's best known for, after all…

A sign on the door reports that Turner officially opens to the public on weekdays in twelve hour windows, 6:00 to 18:00, although this is not cardinal law. Sometimes two hour lunch breaks are important.

Today, a curious holog peeking into the store might see an empty cash register within and tarp-covered shelves.

Today is Saturday…

A block away, a dark-haired woman in a trench coat shoulders her way through a crowd of hologs. Her soundless footsteps hasten as she rounds the corner. Overhead, two tiny eyes inlaid into the belly of a patrol drone dilate as the dust swirls in her wake. But she’s already gone. No bells jingle when she ducks her tall frame into Turner.

Waving the lights on inside, she checks the shop display-sim from her watch via one of her trusty drone feeds, live footage she uses alongside the White Light District’s police force (unbeknownst to them).

Turner remains an unlit shopfront, no activity detected.

So all is well with the world.

“Hello Missy, what brings you here today?”

“You’ve seen better days, Turner.” The woman’s voice quivers strangely because cheap vocal filters are cheap for a reason.

“Speak for yourself, Missy! Today we are-”

“Less verbose, no script.”

Turner stands up wordlessly and his face suddenly goes limp, eyes staring off, unseeing, into the distance.

When he sits back down his head is bowed.

The real Turner's face and credentials hang nostalgically on the wall while his corpse lies at an ideal 2°C in the morgue next door.

Fittingly, the interior of Turner, the store, is coffin-like in shape - the entrance, the coffin head, while the aisle down the center narrows as you reach the back of the store (the foot of the coffin).

After doing a couple more checks and appeasing Turner, the woman makes her way to the foot of the coffin. Usually no one would pass undetected by the front clerk, his eyes narrowing as motion detection gear activates behind his pupils and the word “pistol” hums more intensely in his cerebrum.

No one but Alex, his creator, passes by Turner, the automaton.

From the exit, Alex enters a gray carpeted room with a lone lamp shade on unimaginative corporate-gray carpeting. She hastily presses her thumb to a point on the wall. Sometimes the sims aren’t the best. Sometimes they aren’t pretty at all.

Alex chuckles to herself while the sim morphs around her.

Now, instead of the room she was in, she finds herself in a black tunnel stretching several kilometers before her. At the end of the tunnel awaits a door with a single glowing orange window. Past this door, she descends winding stairs, the steel bottoms of her boots scuffing the concrete, and giving a small clang each time she passes the metal-lined plating marking another floor’s-worth of descent. Her black-rimmed, gray eyes are restless, scanning the walls anxiously for any sim anomalies as she continues on. There’s a burning itch in her throat, and she’s almost out of breath, dizzy when she reaches the first exit along the spiral staircase. She emerges from the orange light to be plunged into darkness once again, her upturned face now illuminated by the watch’s dim glow as she holds it close to her lips and whispers a code. Long ceiling lights give a faint popping sound as they are activated on or off overhead while Alex hauls ass beneath them, making her way to a lift on the opposite side of the garage. Traveling three levels down, she checks the screen on the back of her eyelids.

It reads,

21:32

Address

Sim Level 3 - status: clear

in neon green letters.

The lift’s barred gates slide open with a shudder.

The corridors are now illuminated by dreamy blue halo lights lining the ceiling at even intervals. After several turns, Alex stops at a door along a hallway identical to the one where the lift had initially regurgitated her. Laser fingers shoot out from where the peep hole would be on a regular door. It does a quick sweep over her perspiring face, momentarily framing each bead of sweat along her forehead, nose, and upper lip in a laser red cast. Her image stutters slightly as she passes under the door frame into a large unlit space.

A voice, smooth as butter, says,

Welcome 00067894.

Alex responds mentally -

Hi.

Wake up assistants.

Creaking echoes emanate from somewhere further within the warehouse-like room as automatons stir from under sheets of opaque plastic tarp.

Activate 835, 860, and…

The first automaton stirs, then stretches and yawns. Its bright-blue hair is cropped short, irises rimmed by a pulsing ring of blue which briefly floods the plastic sheet strewn over its face. Standing up stiffly, the glowing eyes look on without expression. Then a slender hand removes the plastic off like a snake shedding its skin. When it emerges, it is unclothed and bears the physical attributes of a human female.

Perform standard protocol.

More forms squirm out from under their own plastic coverings, briefly casting small orbs of red or blue or green as their eyes flicker on. The dark space is littered with their momentary glowing, like multicolored fireflies pulsing for each other without knowing why.

They stand. Shrug off the tarp. Get to work.

Someone activates the lab lights in a separate adjoining room to the warehouse. Another hauls boxes onto a cart, or starts clearing a table cluttered with papers, pens, gadgets and the like.

Alex, standing with her back to the entrance, wordlessly directs the scene, her eyes actively darting back and forth beneath closed lids.

The hallways she recently passed through are suddenly reshuffled to a randomly generated configuration and the door behind her vanishes, its outline melting into the wall.

Her eyes pause their rapid movement while Alex’s skin starts to wrinkle, peeling down from the crown of her head to her toes. It neatly collapses around her feet in measured folds as a compressed accordion might. She steps out of it, and puts it into a case the size of her head.

It took Alex five years to acquire the materials needed to build herself a complete morphsuit like the Miorphus300. The Miorphus300 is made of material requiring microprocessor level precision (and then some): impossibly sterile conditions, a team of nonhuman assistants, and commercial appliances in the possession of only the government and god himself.

[THE INFODUMP SECTION]

The suit’s inner lining is ‘jetty’ - a rubbery padding capable of adapting to any physical form as well as retaining heat or cold with a couple of ____ commands. Temperature switching is advertised to be as quick as 0.5 seconds under ideal conditions, which means “get fucked” in reality. The best Alex got her suit down to was five second switching in a simulator capsule, which translates to almost 100 times this estimate in the “real world,” and an even longer buffer-time under mildly stressful situations like blizzards or wherever lava tends to exist.

Another pro of Jetty is the way it hardens upon impact, absorbing all manner of shocks dealt to the wearer, with the exception of explosives, bullets, and especially sharp things. Jetty’s main con - stiff gait syndrome, or as Alex would put it “I know you have a boner because I have one too.”

That’s what Widow’s Wren is for, a layer fused with the Jetty. A layer composed of material prized for its strength as much as for its amorphous qualities. It’s black fiber, woven from millions of nano-thin strands with a load capacity exceeding its own weight by several orders of magnitude.

These strands can be intricately interwoven and threaded through and on top of the Jetty by microlooms that can realize different geometrical schemas in order to accentuate one or more of the material’s many attributes. However, Alex’s janky version has only the most basic weave configuration, enough to successfully block a tirade of oncoming bullets.

The next layer compensates for what the Widow’s Wren fails to protect against: acid, radiation, and flame. It’s made from Black Composite, sold on the black market by the children of harvesters. To put it succinctly - she blackmailed for Black Composite. Exploiting a White Light District’s zero day was easier than she expected, and the database of secrets yielded some riveting material. But not without a little blood-letting…

It used to be that Turner (the automaton) got machine-gunned so often, Alex had to completely redesign him, and place the sim in front of the store as a kind of first line defense for visitors with anger management issues.

Continuing suit blurb description thing:

On top of the Widow’s Wren is a sandwich of three additional layer groups. Bread bun number one: a metal-based weave, practically weightless, and sewn through with a complex network of wiring set into a clear flexible mold. Above this mold, sensor pads are congregated across all the major human sensory/stimuli receiving centers, with additional consideration for the groin and mouth regions (customizable AND highly marketable, a major win-win). Just underneath the outermost layer of responsive Synthex skin lies a frame that acts as a transfer unit between pores on the external side of Synthex, and its internal pore-channel-counterparts. Each external pore allows for input streams to flow through and into the pore channels which swiftly suction whatever they receive into miniature processing chambers. At the end of each receiving pore channel are tiny sacs that inflate and deflate as they process samplings of air, filtering and then triggering the appropriate quality indicators. Air contaminant and pollutant sensors have a decent chance at identifying environmental toxins found in both wet and dry situations via a continuously self-updating database called Onyx. All relevant specs are displayed across the inside of the wearer’s eyelids.

Another grouping of pores are responsible for temperature and humidity readings and still another, oxygen. The final set of pores act as mini vacuums, similar to the first set, but additionally, are hooked into a complex network of electro optical streams, in which tiny lasers cut through air or trace various trajectories across space. These tiny beams of varying intensities are used to calculate both internal and external suit logistics for better spatial orientation and etc.

Additionally, the pores can also serve as mini spray bottles… sending highly accurate and invisible streams of various substances, from glorified (high-tech) pepper spray, to toxin neutralizing agents, to suit-waste (“perspiration”). It also mimics different skin conditions, hues, and states (blushing, palor), with the option of reflecting the wearer’s true epidermal status at all times or not.

The most current (i.e. within the past two years) morphsuit upgrade of concern to Alex, is an outermost transparency layer, defying detection of almost every kind. Since Alex’s transparency layer is composed of “secondhand” materials put together thanks to contraband design blueprints, it malfunctions. A lot more than she’d like it to, and especially when passing through a) any detection barriers, b) when eating fluorescent–dye fries at a diner (long-story) and c) when her ass is being tracked by people who are good at that sort of thing. And Alex has many trackers in her wake, but only a few that make her sweat.

Anyway, the current suit is enough for moving through Babylon’s tier 2 and 3 districts, because they are always a major downgrade from whatever tier 1 has.

Alex, naked and goose-fleshed, heads over to a dark stone cave turned into a shower hole. She walks with the gracefulness just exceeding that of a zombie, her albino eyes and inner ear implants working hard to adjust to a different spatial realm. Overhead sensor-powered lights start pulsing red as Alex squats down under the shower head, her form like some kind of demonic stuttering image. Then she stops moving. Waits as the water sputters and clunks through the pipes. After several violent spurts, it shoots out frigid water. Hardly noticing the biting cold, Alex reaches up and cranks up the heat to max waiting with forehead pressed to her knees. The feeling of the small space, the darkness, and the faint echo of being underground is the most comforting feeling in the world. And she might have felt fine if not for the comedown. The outermost transparency layer on her Morphsuit, which Alex calls “Polt” (short for “Poltergeist”), is like a holog of its own. It’s capable of syncing up with any nearby holog (like a body snatching demon) or adopting the visage of a holog contained within the system’s inventory, autopiloting the suit wearer to realize a given facade/appearance better. But autopiloting comes with certain understandable drawbacks. Afterall, what marionette is immune to pain in the shoulders where the strings are most tugged?

But at least there are aspects that make using the polt more humane – a portable Locker, serum-drip included. Sometimes Alex wishes she could permanently lock the lid to her Miorphus300, sealing herself in as if into a sarcophagus.

The sound of the rushing water grows muffled as Alex’s mind wanders back to a long-buried memory, one which feels too bright for the darkness of this underground cell…

She’s sitting on the balcony of the topmost floor of a skyscraper, the blinking lights of other apartments and skyscrapers towering far above hers dancing across her face and in her eyes.

A middle-aged man with coal-black hair and warm brown eyes sits opposite Alex. He’s dressed in simple garments – jeans, navy blue t-shirt, and a button-down jacket. He’s barefoot, his heels calloused, ankles lined with dozens of pale gray lines - lowlander/miner scars.

“Alex…”

“Rene, you knew about this from the start.”

“But I’m here, what can I do? Isn’t there another way, maybe I can get the production team to work a little faster, get the mech suit up and running before you go to that goddamn wasteland…” the man takes an uncomfortable gulp, starts again.

“Why can’t we wait, right? Don’t you know what happens to-” His voice is deep and gruff, and he struggles to suppress another pneumonic cough.

Alex looks down, cradles the glass full of what looks like aqua lighter fluid.

“We’ve been waiting five years now, Rene. I can’t keep sitting on this. All I know is what I saw. You’re a lowlander, you were born understanding what they do with pawns and I have to go before they pull the floor out from under me. Everyone’s already on high alert at work-”

“But why would they design so much self-awareness into us then, that we’d potentially enter an infinite loop, disassociate? What good does manufacturing a bunch of glitchy, half sentient automatons do for anyone? ” Rene gestures broadly as he speaks, as if conducting the symphony of blinking city lights before him.

“Your argument has so many holes, I’m not sure why you bother to give it,” Alex replies flatly.

“Describe for me a hole then.”

“Well, for one, there’s research. Ever heard of trial and error?”

“Okay…but why not just run a sim? It’s not like automatons aren’t a drain on resources. Cost-benefit analysis would dictate that-”

Alex broke in, impatiently, “They did that already and Sims can’t break skin, don’t work in the Outbound zones.”

Rene nods, biting his lower lip.

“So you have to go?” It comes out too quietly at first and Rene has to repeat himself.

Alex just purses her lips.

“Okay Alex. Okay. So an army is being raised and tested. Mental fortitude in spite of the meatsuit, is not an inconsequential feature, blah blah. Also we don’t yet know sims don’t work in the Outbounds, unless you’re somehow privy to more information than your average citizen. Oh wait, that’s right, you work for them…But hey, I never asked, don’t worry. I’m not trying to get between you and-”

Alex turned her head away from him. Sighed. Took a swig of lighter fluid. Then suddenly grew fascinated by the city lights swimming before her. That’s when she felt calloused fingers across her cheek, drawing her chin up so Rene could brush his lips more readily against hers.

This sim was pretty good, but the real thing was always better and they both knew it.

“I’m just scared Alex. I can’t help you after you cross that line-”

“I don’t need your help Rene.”

Rene didn’t die. Not exactly. But he wasn’t alive either.

It had been months and the clock was ticking but the hands were blurred, whirring around so fast they showed some flickering image, kept it hanging there in space. Then out of nowhere a jitter in the spinning, a loud crack. Cheap plastic splintering.

Alex threw an orange no.2 pencil that only just manages to lodge itself between the now stuttering fan blades. She’s leaning back on a spinny chair, feet up on the desk. Her wet hair drips onto the parched sandstone floor which soaks up every drop eagerly. The chair tilts as far back as it will go, synthetic leather pushing up against the concrete.

The blades mindlessly continue trying to turn, squealing and revving.

Alex sighs.

The desk is sitting along a narrow and eternal concrete hallway, walls rising far up into darkness. If someone shined a light up at the ceiling, assuming the flashlight was good enough, they’d see the metal-barred under siding of one of the skyways, rusty and peeling.

In front of Alex, the whining beige fan keeps turning its head from side to side, shaking a bit. Trying to be a fan.

She’s wearing a hoodie, shorts. Her feet are bare. Papers are scattered everywhere, sticky with fresh black ink scrawlings. There are ketchup and soy sauce stains on them and on manila folders she didn’t bother with. A soggy stack of take-away boxes and beer cans overflow from a meshed-metal trash can at the foot of the desk.

Electronics don’t work down here. Which suits Alex just fine.

Popping a blue, she lets it roll around in her mouth for a bit. It feels like chalk. Tastes like chalk.

There’s a bright lamp in the corner, some industrial piece of junk, buzzing away happily. She keeps an eye on it, waiting for it to flicker.

It doesn’t.

The chair creaks as she gets up. The room goes a bit out of focus, spins. Thinking better of it, she sits back down.

The clock on the wall reads - 21:00 - which is where it stopped at and will, for the foreseeable future.

Rene wouldn’t have liked that. He always reset clocks and fixed them down here. Underground, it was easy to lose all sense of time.

91 days and some change. That’s how long Rene has been sitting on ice.

3 days ago the backup generators went into gear after the city lights went out. The backup generators had backup generators, giving her a window of about two weeks, if she was smart about her energy consumption. She could probably get the cryo capsule to work on pink ice. But the ice was filthy, full of impurities, and she didn’t exactly have a whole sterilization factory to herself. Besides, the cryo capsule starts to thaw after 20 hours, and impure pink ice could take days and a lot of fine tuning to even start resonating at its base frequency. Syncing the base frequency with the timekeepers could get messy. Only then could its power be realized, put to good work harnessed up to its sucklings.

So, Alex had two weeks. Less than that even.

The white lights in the white light district weren’t working and hunting season was probably to blame for it. Best way for police to starve out wanted criminals was to blind them. Interfere with their comms, show up at the door unannounced so to speak. Send out a pulsing search wave all over the city, change the layout for all WLD claimed real estate. Lowlanders and other errant citizens would have to reset their maps, update all their systems to read the new maps. But as with any upgrade this was bound to have issues - backward compatibility issues as old or improvised suit builds or comm systems struggled to adjust to layout builds WLD engineers knew caused breakage. Some streets or walls wouldn’t make sense, by design, defying physics or proportions in ways that older rendering engines would fail to properly manifest. This practice was old - as old as planned obsolescence from times when physical property mattered. Before sims or what some might call the dark ages. And the dark ages were still very much a reality for lowlanders and anyone who, to any degree, didn’t live a life entirely in white light district hands, trapped in catatonic heaven.

She picked up an old black watch sitting on her desk, fastened it around her wrist and set the timer.

The watch face was now set to count down from:

252:00:00.

She’d give herself a week and a half, with some extra time just in case. She had to find a way to save Rene while she worked on constructing the parts of him that were currently defective, biodegradation kept at bay, frozen (literally) for now. Yet Alex couldn’t shake the uneasiness to the point where it was becoming distracting. Sometimes it seemed she was keeping death at bay more than actually keeping Rene alive.

251:00:00

Plan of Action

Assuming day = 15 hours.

Her plan was as follows:

Day 1, 2 - research the data she’s gathered after several runs in plane V.

Day 3-5 - generate several new city maps and come up with a solid route through Babylon’s plane V

Day 6-8 - complete a successful run in plane V undetected by WLD folks

Day 9 -

Alex was still sitting at her desk, watching the watch face from the corner of her eye, too anxious to get up, too anxious to read, but the time was ticking. She needed to start something. Anything. She adjusts herself on the office chair, hugging her knees to her chest and resting her chin on them. Her arms stretched out, sway around clumsily like tentacles as she moves the first pile of manilla folders closer and pops the cap off a black sharpie. The front of the folder is blank, so she marks it with the sharpie, titling it #1, and starts shuffling through the contents. Everything feels like it’s moving in slow motion, but this task has to be done the old fashion way, because you just can’t automate certain things and she wasn’t about to get the servers and by extension her research engines up and running. Too few resources right now. She’d have to rely on her own head, and the blue pill was working its way through her system already so it was fine. A half full bottle sat next to her, and she’d pop another if she really needed it although right now her bpm was 90, sitting down.

The first page on the stack of contents makes her chuckle.

Fell for an A-Runner. Then her image stuttered.

Whenever the lights were out, every anomaly runner (A-Runner) in the population, the people who weren’t already hooked up and baby-fed the stream (and under the safety of WLD protection guidelines), had to take all their maps offline and cut all current operations.

It was like all the lights being turned off on a lonely neighborhood street, so that anyone out in the open with their unofficial holog was suddenly blinded and exposed, and had to run for cover before whatever lurked in the shadows got to them. If you were caught outside unsuspecting, you’d probably have to reinstate your holog once the lights were on again, overwriting the old with a fresh and newly generated holog version. ‘Lights off’ incidents turned Babylon prefecture into data leaking void space, infiltrating and capturing any unregistered hologs, the non-natives that weren’t one with the system, and hence, didn’t immediately go offline and vanish the moment the light clicked off. Any unsecured hologs caught in the open basically belonged to WLD now - that is, whatever part of them wasn’t encrypted or locked in place. But A-Runners were clever, they worked around this issue as much as possible, trying to get insider information about scheduled map overwrites so they wouldn’t be caught in the open. And even if they did get caught in the open when the lights went out, they made sure their hologs were already secured by default. Sometimes, with older hologs programmed and built on older libraries or engines, even with each successive overwrite WLD made on aboveground map configurations, ghosts were left behind. Glitchy, stuttering after-images of previous anomalies that were hard to wipe since they didn’t belong to WLD directly and once abandoned by previous holog owners, couldn’t be totally removed from dead space in the virtual plane, the plane mostly owned and controlled by WLD. Ghosts, even when their visual representation was superimposed with new visuals by WLD, still existed and although rare, could create anomalous behavior within any successive city scene or any subsequent realized map. They could be anywhere, at anytime, in the walls, in the street, and had to be cordoned off so they wouldn’t interfere. They were like left behind entrails of viruses WLD couldn’t completely clean since hologs could contain several layers of encrypted features, impossible to break. Deadspaces were usually blocked off by WLD patrols or turned into ‘unsafe to trespass’ zones. At some point anomalies started becoming a tool for the non-citizen to regain territory from WLD, areas of deadspace that neither fully controlled. And that’s when WLD sectioned off most of the heavily deadspaced zones and migrated into new land - tier 1, tier 2 districts, leaving the ghost-riddled deadspace infested map inside of tier 3 district. There had been several nuclear powerplants underground, underneath tier 3 district, previously run and maintained by WLD. And there had been several underground levels where lowlanders worked and operated, whole cities and tunnel systems. It was unclear who was responsible for the ensuing nuclear disaster but when it happened, thousands of citizens who hadn’t relocated, by WLD orders, perished and most if not all levels collapsed or became irradiated areas. So much was left behind and so much destroyed, and it was unlikely there were any survivors as water systems and farms were contaminated and the extent of the nuclear disasters still remains unknown. Was WLD responsible for all the disasters, in an attempt to make the place uninhabitable and force relocation?

The number of destroyed or non-functional plants was still unknown.

WLD blamed the disasters on anomolies, or more exactly on the terrorist groups that intentionally left them behind, citing their previous inclination toward city disruptions and toward regaining territory by leaving behind ghosts illegally. They had enough underground space as it was, so why did they need to encroach on WLD’s? Most citizens were convinced, but lowlanders and anomalie runners (A-Runners) knew better. WLD had colonized lowlanders since the dawn of time, exploiting them, managing the underground and transforming it into a multi-level industrial facility that sustained and supported the above ground territories. After the Civil Wars broke out and several Lowlander revolts, WLD began to withdraw from underground cities in what were now underground levels below district 3, leaving behind destitute structures, leading to mayhem and stateless zones struggling to properly organize and manage themselves. Some levels WLD still maintained control over, but at a distance, and only after several compromises between whatever lowlander governments remained and the current WLD administration at the time. Even after a mostly peaceful era post the civil wars and major revolts, lowlander resistance groups and anarchists were causing too much instability for the aboveground city of tier 3 district, then known as _____, the city of lights.

When it eventually collapsed, the Nuclear disaster partly responsible for industrial fallout became an issue.

Decision. A word Alex hates, and avoids as much as possible.

She’s pacing inside of the warehouse, biting her nails and throwing them carelessly on the floor. Only half of the warehouse is illuminated, the illuminated section full of automatons busy stacking and logging boxes full of paperwork and manilla folders with more papers, organizing scraps of metal bits into their respective, labeled containers. Cleaning or else just sitting with their backs to the wall, heads bowed, awaiting new directives. The other half of the warehouse is full of automatons that Alex won’t use right now because they run on DIX which requires her server room to be running. Only analog automatons are at work right now which is great in terms of energy, but lonelier since they don’t talk - interaction isn’t something Alex prioritized into their build.

That’s when she hears it. A clattering ring of a Pinger, from the wall the one she’s closest too. In the unlit half of the warehouse. She drops what she’s doing and breaks into a full sprint, head on into the dark. The phone is on the wall, near the back of the room, in a little cubicle with a rusty stool and an overhead lamp she doesn’t bother to turn on. She lets her eyes adjust to the dark, using muscle memory for the rest. The phone is similar in appearance to a shaft telephone that came installed into the gray concrete wall and Alex kept, from Babylon’s war era.

Only 3 people have access to this communication line. Rene, Rene’s brother, and Turner the bot. If turner is calling, the ringtone will sound like a shrill fire alarm and Alex won’t pick up directly.

Luckily, the ringtone is just the standard metallic clanging of an old telephone.

She picks up on the last round of ringing.

“Yes?”

“Ramen or fried rice?”

“Blue Ramen. Jean, it’s me.”

“Mhm. And call me Clarke.”

Code for - code red level bad news. Find a nearby seat, prep your nerves.

A pause, and jean clears his throat and Alex leans against the cubicle, blood suddenly draining out of her face, her fingernails getting bloody as she bites them anxiously.

“We have a situation.” the voice on the other end cackles with static, and sounds like it's fighting to be heard in a crowded place, other heavily distorted voices slightly audible in the background.

“Are you…are you calling from a radio makeshift? Clarke what-”

“Listen, I don’t got much time, our comms are probably gonna be intercepted any second. I had to set up a 2W2. Someone moved Rene.”

Silence. Alex’s dark vision tunnels a bit and she forgets how to breathe.

“I don’t know where he is, he’s not in the cryocapsule. While the lights were out we had some…breaches. Someone must have gotten into the mainframe cuz he’s not here.”

A million questions are racing through Alex’s head right now - who got put up to this kidnap job and why? What did they want with Rene, he had been officially off grid for two years. As far as white light district people knew, he had been wormfood long since, and something isn't adding up…

“Did you…I…” Alex feels like her lips are moving without sound. Jean responds anyway.

“Sent it. Already. Check the station, tune to…well you know the protocol.”

Click.

Alex doesn’t remember how she got back to the lit half of the warehouse, how she came to be sitting under a showerhead, water so cold it feels like it burns. Everything burns before her, heart pounding in her chest, in her ears, rushing.

The body…the real one…is so fragile…Thinks Alex.

She must command herself, watch Alex watching Alex.

Get up.

Pinch yourself. Hard. Until you bleed.

Walk to the armor bay.

Enter pin, duo authenticate with personal token. You authenticate it by squeezing it three times fast, twice slow, and saying “locker 662” into the tiny mic embedded into the side of the necklace worn around the neck. *

Step on the armementus platform, a circular plate that rotates around as a panel along its floor takes measurements of Alex, her vitals, her dimensions. Robotic arms extend outward and fix Alex in place, then cylindrical capsules descend down from above, surrounding her from ankles to neck. Magneto skin creeps up from the floor, wrapping up and around Alex’s feet fluidly, and stiffening in place like a cast mold. It’s totally clear and camouflages perfectly to Alex’s skin.

The space inside the cylindrical capsules pulse with blue light as the printers start up. A needle rotates out of the inside of the capsule closest to her jugular and inserts itself in her neck. She twitches slightly. It retracts. Alex is still.

Heart rate falling to a good 60 BPM.

Rotating blades unfurl about the openings on either end of the capsule, closing in with vacuum seal protection ensured about Alex’s neck and ankles. The capsule fills up with jelly, viscous fluid that stiffens, flush to Alex’s body.

Now the ray tracing, sweeping over her outline, sheets of light slicing horizontally through the viscous fluid. A solution is introduced into the gelatinous membrane most directly around Alex, contained by an invisible chemical barrier. The solution membrane thins out the mucus sealant congealing against her skin, until it feels like water. Goosebumps appear on her forearms. It is pleasantly soft and silky. The blue solution has successfully altered the jelly into resin, the resin now